52 Napkins
by benignmilitancy
Summary: "...and that answers your question of why we don't have mustard in this house." Unable to sleep one night, Darry goes to the kitchen and writes his slumbering daughter a letter. One-shot.


_Disclaimer__: I don't own "The Outsiders."_

_A/N: These past few days have gotten me to thinking about fathers, what role they play, and more importantly, my own. Like with my mother, I can't say I admire him enough. He's sixty-five, went to Vietnam at 18, endured horrors alongside my mother, and has had some health problems for a while now. He sells antiques and so he needs to buy things at yard sales, which involves walking around and the need to move. Normally walks down drives don't bother him, but lately he's been getting winded and tired, which is unusual for him. A couple of months ago he was in the hospital for a throat infection. A bad one. The doctor said if we'd gotten him admitted just a day later he would have died. But that was a secondary thing compared to what he's been experiencing lately; there's still something that's making him tired and winded._

_Yesterday my dad had a minor stroke; or at least, that's what the doctors think. He has some weakness in his left arm and leg, but ultimately he's in as good a shape as a stroke victim can be: no paralysis, no slurred speech, no sloping smile, no brain damage. _

_So I know this sounds stupid, but the minute I heard the news, I was calm. Completely and utterly. Not a trace of fear. Not even the smothered kind, the kind I get when things creep up on me upon further reflection. I thought it was because I had seen both my parents and myself hospitalized numerous times (Mom, three times, for pneumonia, gallbladder surgery and COPD; Dad twice, for his throat infection and this; me, twice, for panic attacks. But who's keeping score, huh?). And I'd been scaremongered so much by doctors (When I was 13, almost 14—like Ponyboy, mind you—the stupid doctor walked in and flat-out told us with ME IN THE ROOM that my Mom wouldn't live another five years—and if I ever see that man again I'd like to say to him, "Fuck you, whoever the fuck you are, you stupid quack; fuck you and the fear that's gripped me from that one god damned thing come out of your flapping yaw. How many others have you scared?") and clumsy relatives that I've got a sort of armor concerning hospitals. But there was this other part of it: I asked a psychic once if my parents were going to be okay, specifically Dad, and she said Yes, although he'd have a scare, it was ultimately going to be beneficial and change his perception about health. So, believe or not, skeptic or no, there was that._

_The thing is, it's been weird lately, as if Fate keeps pointing me to this motif of father: a couple of days ago I just saw the ending of Half Life 2 Ep. 2 for the first time, in which one of the main characters' father (Eli Vance) gets killed before her eyes and neither she nor the player can do anything to stop it. It was shocking, depressing, beautiful, tragic: I can't properly describe all the feelings. The first time I saw it I blinked. And I watched it twice. It was like getting smacked in the face with a baseball bat. It had ended with her sobbing over her father's body and saying, "Don't leave me," as the screen faded to black._

_Later on, in the hospital, I was watching "That '70s Show." The episode that came on was the one where Hyde meets his real father (William Barnett) for the first time. And him dealing with his own feelings about that._

_I guess the point of this A/N is to sort of put forth to the world the love I feel for my father, who has in his own way, just like my mother, nurtured and protected me from the world. But as they grow older, and more fragile, I start to realize that they, too, are only human. I've realized that to be a daughter is to be selfish, in a way, that in looking back and watching you can see the ways that they've lost for you. That the seed of dreams isn't really lost between generations, only transmitted. Or so I'd like to hope. And the day you see within the past your parents' sacrifice, and appreciate the humanity and hope inside their loss, is the day you flower._

_With "The Outsiders," I've been thinking a lot about Darry, because I am getting older—nearing his age, actually—and I guess sort of thinking of where I can go at that age, who I am, who I can be. And when I think of Darry my first thoughts sort of go to "father figure." I've always wondered, more or less, what kind of father he'd be. What kind of man he can flower into. And my thesis, if you can call it that, is this. A sort of archetypal "love letter" written in the best POV of a father I can manage, documenting one precious little girl's selfishness, and the acceptance of that very state: the grace of manhood which is achieved when one fully becomes a father, in body and spirit._

_So, all in all, even though he may never see this, this story is dedicated to my Dad: the Darry and the glue of us three._

* * *

_52 Napkins  
_

* * *

"_...and that answers your question of why we don't have mustard in this house." Unable to sleep one night, Darry goes to the kitchen and writes his slumbering daughter a letter. One-shot.  
_

* * *

It's a cool night. There I am, good old Dad, leaning against the railing in his black silk vest and red carnation, thinning hair slicked back like Marlon Brando. It must seem like something out of a movie: behind me there's the focus of the evening, the swirl of light and music and perfume and laughter spilling out like the Garden of Eden cracked open. I'm looking out, away from it, towards the boats that come in across the lake, trying to hear through the wind the calls of the men on the dock. My jacket is slung over the pavilion railing, which has been strewn with daisy petals by the flower girls. You said I looked nice in it. It was. Then at the two-hour mark it got stuffy.

I wouldn't make a good James Bond.

Then, a hand on my shoulder, gently at first, then firmer, surer of itself. Coupled with it is your face, and your voice, the one I wanted to hear all day. You smile and the twinkling fairy lights glint off your teeth.

"Can't find anyone to dance with?"

"When you have the best one first," I say, "all the others get flatfooted."

And I turn away.

There your head goes, on the cusp between my shoulder and my neck, in the place it's always been. You sling my stuffy jacket over your shoulders, and for a long time we watch the boats and their little lights glide across the black lake.

"So," I say.

You smile again, wink, and tuck it into my breast pocket. I take it out, running my thumbs over it. It's nothing. There's a thousand of them on the cake table, all ready for the taking: a napkin, pale blue. Yet I wanted this most of all.

There's a reason for that.

One night, when you were two and your father a mere twenty-three years older, your mother didn't come home. And it was the first night I came home with you alone. It was the first night it was just the two of us. You were fussy. You wanted Mama. But all there was was Daddy. And you didn't want Daddy. Daddy got tired real fast. He wanted to lie down and cry. But he gave you a bath, put you in the little white bassinet beside the bed, turned and closed the door.

The house was empty for him, real empty. You see, Mama had a way of filling up a room with her presence. The rooms didn't seem quite so empty with her around; the clock was quieter; the night was brighter; Daddy's heart didn't beat in his chest so loud and thick. I can close my eyes now and be that same man again, as if it were right now. Up until then I hadn't known how bright a candle can burn, or how warm the sunshine makes the playground, or just how deeply your tears can cut me open.

Well, the truth is you're not that little girl anymore, and I wish I was still twenty-five. Hell, I wish I was any age where I could lie completely down on my back.

This is on the wedding napkin you gave to me. Maybe you were thinking I'd frame it and hang it up on an obscure wall in the house. Nope. Instead I'm writing all over it and returning it to sender; I hope you don't mind. I don't have a napkin fetish, despite what the past twenty years might have told you. A long time ago, on that very night, I went to the kitchen, took out a napkin and started writing you a letter. A long one. Yes, I admit it. I am the napkin bandit. I am the napkin thief. I took napkins from diners, birthday parties, picnics, fairs, people's houses. Oh, there's all sorts. Ones with flowers on them, plain ones, ones that say Happy Anniversary, Happy Birthday, Congratulations, polka-dotted ones, striped ones, fancy wedding ones. Sometimes you can see their years, the dust from being packed together and so tightly; ever since my dog Pepper ripped out my science notes in the seventh grade I've had this pathological fear of losing paper. So before I bound them together and put them in this gold-embroidered box I wound up saving a total of fifty-two napkins.

I'm not like your relatives. I can't afford a thousand-dollar crystal set, but maybe I can do them one better. It's as my mother once said: If you can't be expensive, be memorable. So here it is: a gift, from your old, old man, on the last of these fifty-two napkins.

—Dad.

* * *

_one: darry, darry, quite contrary_

* * *

Little girl, I ain't gonna lie: you make me tired. So tired. You go to bed at seven-thirty, and after I try to get you to eat and fail miserably and we read the same book again for the fifth time—that engine just keeps on chugging—you wake me up two hours later, just as I go to sleep, with a cry that could pierce an armored tank. So I grumble a little and put on my clothes and get up, because Lord knows it, losing your Puppy is as bad as murder, if not more. You love him with all that heart and it sticks in your throat when he's stuck under the crib, just out of range. Your arm's sticking between the slats and flailing around the dark open air, and you keep screaming in frustration, because it's there, you can see it, it's lying on the rug and it's so damn close and you know you can get it if you try, yet you can't reach that half-inch farther, your arm is too short. No matter how far you go you just can't reach it.

I know the feeling.

Your eyes are big and dark and wet; I say, "Hey there, little lady, what's wrong?" I must sound a good deal like Mama, because you stick your arms over your head. I pick you up, pick Puppy up, walk you around the house two or three times. You're getting heavy. And you make my arms fall asleep.

In the morning I'll put you in your chair next to mine and I'll try to get you to eat some beans—despite my better sense. You wind up getting most of it in your hair, and in mine, too. I'd say it's a good look for me, but not so much for you. So we put you in the bath, with the toys bobbing in the water, the duck and the boat and the washcloth we pretend is the Bath Ghost. And when you're nice and clean and smell like soap, you giggle and take the time to spit your breakfast all over the front of my good shirt. Stupid Daddy, you say, as you smile with your toothless gums. You should know better than to walk around with good shirts on.

Some days you get a fever, an ear infection, a bad hair day, and you won't stop crying. All day. All night. The babysitter is close to tears herself when I come home. She says she's picked you up and set you down and heated the bottle and read the book and wiggled the toys and sang the same song twenty-seven times. And as she blubbers out her story I can see the look in her face—that tiniest, tiniest bit of condemnation, that almost imperceptible shade of disgust, as if to say, Well, that's it, this is it, this baby's too much, she screams too much, something must be wrong with her, something is wrong with her.

I call her the next day and say: "You're fired."

But don't get no ideas now. You might have Daddy wrapped around your little finger but he's still got two eyes and ears of his own, hear? You ain't walking out of this house with no hot air in your head. I know you're already full of it. From the day you were born I saw it. That little gleam of mischief in your eye. I remember standing in the hospital room with the blanket wrapped around you, and the minute you opened your eyes, you looked up at me and you said, very plainly, Oh no. Oh, _hell _no.

I saw that. I did.

Someday—not today, but don't I sure feel like it—I'll be old. Certainly not rubbing noses with my grave, hopefully, but not quite able to turn around and head back the way I came. And I guess by that time you'll be grown and wanting to know certain things.

How did I raise two boys when I was still a little green myself.

How did I come home missing your mother and still keep my head screwed on.

How did I watch the world keep turning.

I might not be able to answer them all, but I can tell you this: Not easily, little girl. Not easily.

* * *

Words on paper can't bring much more than a shadow of a person, but I hear if you do it right then maybe, for a minute, they almost become real. Almost. You can almost reach out with your fingers and feel the blood flowing through their veins.

There are people who sit on the windowsills and on top of the piano and watch us from the walls; you can only see them through the tiny windows they were frozen inside. Behind the glass, they're smiling, they're frowning, they're full of color and sound. From where we are, while things keep moving, they look like they're not quite real. And I'll tell you right now that no, in front of the glass they aren't so real: they saw that people were looking at them from behind the glass, so they smiled, they grimaced, they stayed blank. They hid their joy and their pain. That's why you got to get behind the glass and dig until you find them again: Mom, Grandma, Grandpa, Johnny, Dallas, Sodapop. They're stuck in little windows somewhere, mostly frozen, but every now and then they emerge to the surface, and breathe, and move like they once did.

Your grandfather was a soldier who lost his first home and built himself a new one. Your grandmother was a woman who had learned how to go where life took her and not according to what everybody else thought, which was that Dad was an arrogant know-it-all who'd knock her up and leave. Well, the first part was true. Dad did know it all. He didn't need no one telling him he did. (One time he said to me: "Son, if I'm wrong, I'll admit it, but I never do because I never am," which made Two-Bit, the funny guy, choke on his soda. ) And he could get a little puffed up because of it. But Mom stayed with him for it all. She stayed with him for twenty years.

I could tell you all the stories but it won't come close to the pictures. Like that picture of your mother there, up on the mantel.

You'd think I'd be lying through my teeth if I told you that I met your mother when she knocked on my door. Because who meets their spouse at the door? It's always somewhere mundane and yet idealistic, and most preferably not your own—the library, the grocery store, the bowling alley—or, if the couple's especially seedy, a bar, or a knife-fight, or maybe a chain-gang. Nope. Someone knocked on my door, I opened it. It just so happened the person on the other side was your mother.

"Mornin'." That's her, looking up. In one hand a map. New to town.

She was a little younger than me—she had these weird-as-hell hippie friends. Her one friend wanted to throw a party. The BIG party, the one people'd be talking about in their seventies. Problem being, her friend was too shy to knock on folks' doors and invite people, so for the price of dinner she—your mom—agreed to drive across the block and knock on all the doors that looked good. (Life was stranger then; things happened, you just rolled with it.) Apparently, in the space between Cherry and Whiteriver Street, my house was trapped in Party Invitee territory. That year, until the girl moved out, your mother invited me to twenty-eight parties. I didn't have to dress up, dress down. I had to bring only myself. I said yes to only one.

"What kind of party?" I say.

"A getting to know you party," she says, shrugging. "Y'know?"

"No."

"The kind that's boring as hell."

She had this thin copper hair that went to her shoulders in tight tiny curls. She was worried because her hairline was already far back and some of it was still falling out (_"They left the Christmas tree out till July"_). Starting from the top she had brown eyes, thin lips, a pointed chin, a flat chest (because when you're twenty-one, and of a decidedly male persuasion, these are the things you take note of), the whitest teeth this side of the continent. She was skinny, actually, real skinny, all arms and elbows. Not my type. At first. But when she smiled her lips parted and there it grew, slowly, lighting up each inch of her face like a match over a hearth. When I said I'd think about it, she took my hand and she let loose that smile and she thanked me so much for agreeing to come, Linda was gonna be _thrilled,_ and all I could say was _You wellcuhh...?_

Nah. In my head I did. What came out of my mouth was, "Darry. You?"

"Penny."

When I was drunker, and meaner, I tortured her about it later. Penny Loafer. Wheat Penny. Hey Look, Shiny Penny. Penny For Your Thoughts. In turn she couldn't think of anything G-rated enough to call me so she called me Darry, Darry, Quite Contrary.

I thought it was the best damn name anyone gave me since my dad.

Couldn't tell you why I went that one night; and it wasn't 'cause I had nothing to do. I just hated block parties. It was probably going to be some loud illegal ball of confusion, where folks dance on top of the tables and break windowsand things like that. And me not knowing none of these kids (after high school my friends flew off to the corners of the country like a hammer to glass), and having had that experience some years before—shut up—I got bored real quick. I didn't know. I spent the entire night locked in the coat room.

So half an hour later your mother and I were sitting on the bed—fully clothed, mind you—with beers in our hand and the door closed. People weren't too nosy back then, being too high to care, or maybe they really didn't miss their coats too much. Long-hairs hated wearin' clothes.

Look. There's (locked) beer in the liquor cabinet, yeah. I would be lying if I said I melted at the stuff. (Don't look at me—at least you never came home and found your old man sleeping upside down in the rocker with his feet on the window and his head on the floor, dead to the world. The hard evidence wasn't there but I knows the crime when I sees one. Dad swore up and down that he wasn't smashed, that I was crazy, I must've walked in through the ceiling. And I said: "Yeah, and where'd you park the flying house, Dorothy?" Turns out he fell asleep at the poker table down in the basement, and his buddies, pallies they were, hauled his ass into the chair and left, presumably twirling their curly black mustaches as they did.) But I ain't no drunk. I've seen what that shit does to you... Too much.

I don't party like I used to, and maybe that's partly for dumb reasons—still, I just don't. I don't, because then I start to get talking, a lot, and I bug people off. And it's funny. Lots of folks I know who have the loudest flappers clam right up when the drink hits 'em, but the wallflowers—though no one who knows can really call me a wallflower—wind up being the ones climbing on top of the table. I don't know. It's like this button in my brain's gone off and oops, deploying speech in three, two, one. And not the good kind either. The stupid kind.

I turn to your mother and I say: "Look at that spider. Look at that web. Ever notice how it slaves away and we wave our hands and in two seconds destroy its entire life's work?"

The memory was so painful that for atonement I banged my head against the shower wall twenty-two times the next morning. Why? Why? _Why_ on God's green earth can't I throw up on the nice lady's_ shoes_ and fall face-first on the _floor_, just like_ everybody_ else? How come I have to be my own friggin' football announcer, too?

She must've been drunker than me, though, because she said: "That's beautiful," and burst into tears all over my shoulder. And then I fell asleep under somebody's coat.

It's nice to have somebody cry for you.

* * *

May 14th, 1970:

"Daddy?" You. Holding a picture in your hand.

"Uh-huh." Me. Under the sink, looking for a wayward spider. Trying to think of a good enough excuse so the plumber don't laugh his own ass off.

"Does Grandma love me? Even though she can't touch me?"

I think about it for a minute, and I say: "Ever since you were born."

"Is that why she smiles every time I go up the stairs? She'n Grandpa?"

"That's right," I say.

"She smiles when I'm 'sleep?"

"Yeah."

"I smile at her, too," you say, and you stretch your arms to envelop the sunshine beating down on them. "Every day I give her a great big hug, like this, till I fall down, an' I say,_ Love you_! An' she says,_ Love you more_! And every day the sun shines she watches me get bigger and she says, Look, that's Viv, she got the same name as me, that's why I smile so much and say Love you more."

* * *

May 14th, 1990:

"The hell is this?" Me. Holding a coffee in my hand.

"Mario." You. Not looking up.

At first I just think it's some fancy distraction, but wouldn't you know it, by three o' clock the next morning I'm glued to the damn thing.

I can make this jump—I can do it—I can do it—hammering buttons as fast as my heart—left right left right left jump fly duck oh shit I got hit select right jump—missing the jump—going down, man down, man down—banging the controller against the floor—god damn it god _damn_ it this game is rigged—

"Can I go to bed now?" you moan. "It's three in the_ morning_—"

"Just this one, I promise. Hey, look, I got the cape! I got the cape!"

"Great."

"Watch me float over the stage," I say. "I can fly over everything."

"Wonderful."

"_Wheee_—" I'm a little too giddy. And then I get hit by a winged turtle, turn small, and drop through a bottomless pit. "Oh, _fuck you_—"

A couple of more clicks and I start the game again.

You press your head into the pillow, presumably suppressing a bloody scream. Or a massive ripper. In any case, you've had it with your old man.

"Dad," you say when you turn your head, quite matter-of-factly, and I pout at the television. Little Miss College takes a break from the roost and she thinks she knows it all. "You are forty-four years old. You should not be _wheeing_ at anything."

"Bull," I say. "You never get too old to whee."

And that's the damned truth.

* * *

_two: mustard  
_

* * *

I'm not going to lie: sometimes I, too, screw up. Ninety-five percent because I am human, like you, but probably five percent because I can get dumber than a bag of hammers. Sometimes I mess up. OK, sometimes I downright fuck up. Sometimes Superman gets a little Jimmy Olsen and they got to come in with the sirens and the axes and cut him down from the tree.

I just wish I had known that, before you ran off crying and me standing in the hallway with a pair of scissors in my hands, cutting bangs are the _one_ thing you do_ not _do DIY.

And that hair always grows back.

...I hope.

* * *

OK.

Writing on walls I could take. On floors, fine. Sinks, chairs, windowsills, toilet seats, the dog—_pshhh._ Bring it on. I ain't a'scared of you.

Stains I could take. Messies, oopsies, oozies, bloodies, scrapies, gluies, ooeys and carpet burn. All of 'em. Every type; life plays dirty, it's gonna get dirty. I seen a lot in my life, the weird stuff that comes out of you when you're banged-up more than the usual.

Case in point: a long time ago, but not in a galaxy far, far away. (Okay. _Maybe_.) The gas station, as I'm filling up the tank. Down the street flounces Two-Bit, fresh and chipper, brightly poking at his right shoulder.

Two-Bit: Oh, shit. Oh, fucking _shit._

Me: What?

Two-Bit: This thread in my shoulder. Oh, man. Stings like a_ bitch_.

And he yanks up his sleeve, of course, so I can see the clumsy sewing I managed. He had gotten his shoulder busted in a barroom brawl, had got himself smacked somewhere near the armpit with a Coors bottle; apparently the neck broke off and a few shards entered the skin. To this day he's still digging out microscopic pieces of glass, but he can't really justify looking under his arm in public... And through the blazing adrenaline of... a barroom fight... don't know... never been in one—he somehow managed to crawl to the telephone behind the counter and ring our number, and after the room was empty and the punches flown he lay stuck to the floor like a wet paper bag. The bar's owner was sweeping his broom around him. Didn't say _Howdy._ Didn't say _Who the fuck're you._ Didn't even blink. And I thought, _Don't ask, it's better if you just let it be. _

When we tried picking him up, he screamed. We set him down, and ultimately it took half an hour to carry him out to the car. Was kinda like trying to figure out how to move a sofa through the door, the three of us just standing there, staring at him, considering this angle and that. Then I hitched a hand under his bad shoulder. On accident. He whipped his head around, shouted through a shining face and gritted teeth: "_Looks like_ _Doc's gonna have to cut some heads from asses!_"

Anyhow. Back to the scene at hand. Captain Dumbass is poking a finger into his wound, half-smiling, half-wincing, commenting on how bad it hurts when he does it. So fucking bad, man.

Me: What about it?

Captain Dumbass: I think it's rotted.

Me: I sewed you up two days ago.

Captain Dumbass: Yeah, but this dark black crusty stuff? The hell is that?

Me: ...Blood?

Captain Dumbass: Huh?

Me: Blood turns black when it clots.

Captain Dumbass: Nah, I know that, but yesterday Mum put sum'in weird on it and it's been—_Christ!_

Me: Look, I'd love to stay and watch you poke your own wounds, but I got to get back—

And then in comes Sodapop on his break, dirty towel slung over his shoulder. Steve's behind him, chewing off his last bite of Mr. Goodbar.

Soda: Nonsense. You can stay for tea and crumpets.

Me: Oh, boy. Tea _and _crumpets?

Soda: -_All this while smiling wider than the Gulf of Louisiana._- Fuck you, Darry, we slaved all day over these tea and crumpets, we toiled all day to make this just for you, me'n Steve, we put our blood, sweat, an' tears into this tea and crumpets, and when we say you stayin' for tea and crumpets, goddammit, you gonna_ stay _for tea and crumpets, you lowdown punk!

Me: Them's fightin' words.

And then he raises his arm and tries to lock me into his darkly-stained armpit. We wrestle for a minute, but I'm tired from hauling and he's been working for only two hours, so naturally he wins.

Soda: Smell me.

Me: No.

Soda: Do it.

Me: No.

Soda: C'mon, man—

Me: _No—_

Soda: You do know it's either this or last week's gym socks.

Me: Fuck... like roses.

Soda: Tuff.

Me: ...In nuclear winter.

Captain Dumbass: _God!_

Steve: Penny for your thoughts, Two? If it hurts when you touch it then maybe you should stop touching it.

Soda: _-biting his bottom lip- _Aw, Steve, man, don't you know? He can't stop touchin' himself.

Steve: Hoo boy.

Me: There's a problem.

Captain Dumbass: What?

Steve: Stop touchin' y'self, Two.

Soda: Yeah, stop touchin' yourself.

Me: Ain't good for you.

Captain Dumbass: Man, I know it ain't.

Me: But you can't stop.

Captain Dumbass: Nope. It's like I'm addicted or something.

Steve: Ain't we all.

Soda: I hear if you put pressure on it it feels better.

Steve: A lotta, lotta pressure.

Soda: So much it hurts.

Steve: But hurts just right.

Soda: -_singsonging_- Till it _allll_ goes away. _-Cue Steve snorting and rubbing his hand under his nose.-_

Captain Dumbass: -_"Woosh" goes the train._- Yeah, hurts worse'n fuck, it does kinda feel good after a while.

Sodapop taps out of the game. He bangs his head against the pillar, letting it hit with a crack. His shoulders are quaking and he's so red he looks like he's gonna hack up a lung.

Captain Dumbass: Huh? _-as he's rolling down his sleeve_- The fuck's the matter now—?

At this point we've all grown red in the face.

Captain Dumbass: Oh .._. oh._

Captain Dumbass:Assholes.

Most folks usually have one or two things they get squirmy about. (Your mother hated shit with a real passion. She was always retching at the changing table, which I didn't understand. I said, "Honey, you make the shit machine, you clean up its backfires." Needless to say I slept on the couch that night.) I'm a little more immune. (Though I don't think I could see a man's face getting peeled off by field medics as he's still talking, like Steve said, and stapled back on again. That's—more disturbing than unclean.) I mean, what are three-year-olds but bundles of messes? You love them but you wouldn't let your dog lick 'em without a good hosing down. Not to say you made me neurotic—you'd cringe in horror of the abominations that come from living with two other boys—yet because I had done my homework early I guess I was feeling pretty over-confident. I'd been prepped for stuff like this ever since I watched my kid brothers at ten. For the abnormalities. For the coronary inducers. For the things that defy all rational explanation and make you reconsider the machinery of the universe—_how in the world can THAT fit in something that SMALL? And how could this child have already found a way to jam it in?_

Oh, it's all sorts of things. Coming home and seeing the roof's shingles scattered in the yard or the dog stuck under the bed or the dirty clothes stuffed into the trash can or a peanut butter sandwich left to die a slow cruel death on the uppermost cabinets or twenty bars of soap stacked up and melted inside the oven to see if they could miraculously form a mega-bar (not saying nothing from personal experience...). I was ready for all of that. I was ready for the worst of it. I was ready for whatever your three-year-old mastermind could hurtle at me.

You, on the other hand, had said Screw you, Daddy, and decided to change the color of the carpet.

With mustard.

So there you sat and laughed and played in the mess while my thoughts rattled around my skull—_oh God, oh God, yellow all over her, all over the fingers and the toes and the crevices in between her arms and on her teeth and under those toenails and here's some clumps on her eyelashes and now she's eating it don't eat that get away from that oh man oh man how long was I gone, two minutes, two minutes and she gets up and into the mustard and—will she be a teenager with her skin tinted yellow? I mean how in the hell did she get it that far down her back and in her hair, wait, it's in her HAIR, after I gave her that bath—oh my god is that yellow on my brand-new sofa? My BRAND-NEW sofa? And it's just not on her and the carpet and the sofa it's fucking EVERYWHERE wait what's that noise is someone knocking oh fuck oh Christ the neighbors'll think I'm trying to grill my own baby—_and as I hoisted you up the way I would a barrel of nuclear waste, you burst out laughing, kicking your feet against my jeans, leaving patches of pale yellow on them.

"Laugh it up, hun," I said. "Pretty soon you're gonna be so scrubbed your shit'll come out twinkling like polished silver."

The water was yellow.

Let me repeat.

The water.

Was yellow.

And the tub.

And the soap.

And my arms, up to my elbows.

Was yellow.

I hate mustard yellow; I'm pretty sure it's the color of evil. I drained the damn tub three times and still, _still_ it was there, faintly and undying, like an—like an evil condiment aura or something. If I had thought you were beyond redemption before, I was planning on living inside one of those Oscar Mayer Wiener cars for the rest of our days. But you didn't give a shit. You said, "Dadda, look," and splashed yellow water in my face.

_Yellow water._

...and that answers your question of why we don't have mustard in this house.

* * *

_three: immigrants_

* * *

Sometimes I can't help but wonder if we're immigrants from another place: that what we call home is actually a host, a place to rest a weary head and keep shelter from the ongoing storm. Of course, at this point I might be getting too philosophical for most folks' taste, so I keep the thought tucked away in my brain. It's just that every now and then it goes astray.

There is a man I hope you'll talk to one of these days. He's our neighbor, but like a lot of new neighbors, he hides behind his own four walls. He comes from the time when neighbors really filled into the word: a visitor from another place, peering into ours. I would go myself, but I've had this weird start with him—and once you've had a weird start, it only gets weirder.

The day he moved in he spotted me from across the street. He went right over to where I was, hosing down the car, and he stood as straight as his height would allow and he stuck out his hand. "Korea."

I took it.

A flicker came to his eyes. He regarded me for a moment.

"Wanna come in for a beer?"

"Sure," I said.

"They stole all ours."

"Sounds like 'em," I said.

To this day all I know him as is "Korea." His mailbox says "James Boulane" but every time I pass his house and he waves at me I can't help but see the word scrawled across his face like some indelible ink. Every time I get the paper, every time I wash the car, every time I walk into his home, that's what I see. Even in the most timid and civilian of his possessions I see something of it. As if some part of it was lost, or opened like some ill-healed wound and now it stains and bleeds through everything a little, in its own way. His '68 Camaro, Korea. Grandfather's tobacco pipe, Korea. The crème sodas in his garage freezer, Korea. Paperweights, Korea. Desk, chair, grandkids' art projects, sleeping bluetick, china cabinet, television, duvet, curtains, photo of dead wife, pots, pans, box of crackers on the shelf. Korea, Korea, Korea.

That kind of man, he can smell the lies on me. He can smell the lie beyond that, though, the biggest one being me. I should be lying dead in a field somewhere. That feeling of being misplaced, misused, years of Ain't that a damned shame, followed by wandering eyes, at the back of my head. I can feel it, there in the shadow of his face, that taints his smile: Someone precious has replaced me, a friend or someone's son, someone's father; and there I am, alone and well, the blood flowing in my lone veins where it could have saved something so much more important.

I couldn't take it. I excused myself to the bathroom, yanked open the window, and squeezed through.

The next day the guy sticks a note in my mailbox:_ When I was your age I hopped out the back of a moving truck and hocked off my own cousin's furniture. It's been about thirty some years now. Think I should tell him his new couch ain't comin' in?_

He's a good man.

* * *

I remember how I used to sit in an advanced philosophy class. And how the teacher pointed to the blackboard and talked on and on and on... I remember how bored I used to get, how I thought I'd never use any of this stuff in real life. It was just something I did to pass the time—plus a lot of cute girls seemed to dig the deep bookish guys.

One day, though, I won't forget. One day the teacher sat down. Our teachers never sat in front of us, ever; they always were the bosses of us. They always paced the floor, held the dais, the desk, the blackboard, with a proud, almost defiant kind of poise. Like a code—that they were towers and we the mere spectators. But I guess, being only human, Mr. Addison forgot it that day.

That day was the day his daughter had killed herself, some twenty years ago, and he... needed some ears to listen.

We all fell silent.

He talked about being alone—how some people thought there was only your existence and nothing else. And I never knew what he meant. To be alone. To be really, truly, to-the-core-of-me alone. I thought I had known—I thought I had known so many things.

Pony—Soda—I imagined so many things for them, some with me, some without.

Did I do right by them? Did I ever do right?

I tried to keep it together. It was too easy to slip into a daze, and I often did, blinking awake only to find I hadn't even been asleep.

Football. Cars. Girls. It used to be mine. All mine. Dad's smile and Mom's eyes. Rainy days pattering on the windowpane, the sun beating hot on the rides at the fair. The smell of chicken, the smell of cinnamon. Soaked clothes. Dry towels. Pretty girls splashing in a moonlit lake; bonfires smoking on the sand; kisses I pray will never end. Books. Coffee. Wondering. A girl named Molly Anderson. Driving. Haystacks. Swearing up a loud one that time I step in cow dung; Dad laughing so hard he can't breathe; new leather boots, cracked from the box; the old ones piled under the bed.

Spring. Leaves. Mud. The snake that bites Pony in the woods; the way it bobs and heaves before I stamp it into the rocks; the dark smear on my toes; Mom and Dad hollering at each other all the way to the hospital. Soda's face. College applications. The hole Two-Bit kicked through the screen door. Teaching Soda how to spit. Piano lessons. "It's F-A-C-E." Mom's fingers flying over the ivory keys. Soda and Steve, Steve and Soda, joined at the hip, blood brothers. Poorly-drawn hopscotch. Tire swings. Red Rover, Red Rover. Falling off white picket fences. "Just a minor sprain, Mr. Curtis." Casts. Pills. Spoons. So many bottles of creme soda Mom swears I'm hitting acid. Turn up the radio. Bouncing on the bed. Bouncing off the walls. Turn it up, turn it up, 'cause that's how we roll. Turn it up. Turn it up some more.

Landing on my knees—in the grass—on my face. The Kinks—"hey, I can scream, too, think I could make a killing at it?" Elvis. The Animals. The Band. The Rolling Stones. Frank Sinatra. Aw, Mom, you're no fun. "I'm just doing my job, sweetheart."

Christmastime. Sugar cookies. Golden tinsel, tight sweaters. Making fun of the new kid's Bronx accent. "Whaddah yuh, mah mudder?" Laugh till he breaks somebody's hand.

Huge diamond icicles. Snowballs. Dancing and darting round the street pole. The pinks of our wet tongues approaching icy rust. So close. Closer.

"I dare you."

"I double dare you".

"You're not a man."

"I am, too."

Mom shrieking and Dad swearing as he tries not to spill the entire bowl of hot water on Steve's tongue.

Johnny, Two-Bit, Dallas. Sitting in front of the mirror with a razor to my cheek. Will I die? Pony, Soda, Steve. Paul Holden patting a dusty homeplate. Swing-batta-batta-_swing_. Dad shrieking when I let go of the gas. "That tree came up so fast I was flashing back to Tereu."

Mom smiling, shaking her head. "You flash back to Tereu when you put away the dishes, too, dear."

Spanish. Composition. Biology. That dragon I scribbled over the F on my report card. _It's just an inkblot, I swear. _

"What are you gonna do besides tossin' the pigskin for the rest of your life?"

Fuck you. I can do math.

"You're failing geometry? How on God's green earth are you failing geometry?"

Sitting on the bed. Shrinking to nothing.

"Because it ain't real math."

Dad, scowling when he pinches the bridge of his nose.

"I'll talk to you later, Dar."

Thunderstorms. _Krrr-boom._ I won't die from razors. Dreams. Dreams of falling. Of fire. Waking up with a crushed feeling in my chest.

Me. Pony. Soda. Sodapop blazing here and there like a lit firecracker.

"Hey, Dar, watch this." The smells of the rodeo—dust and hay and shit. A crack; the gelding slipping off; silence. Soda screaming but all that pours out of his mouth, silence. Ambulance lights flashing red and blue in our faces.

Pop goes the pencap. Drawing something naughty on Sodapop's cast, turning it towards the inside of the ankle just so he can see."For your eyes only. Don't tell Mom or I'll strangle you. Sincerely, Darry." A secret we keep for years, rolling our eyes and biting the pockets of our cheeks. "What are you two grinnin' so much about?"

Church on Sunday. "Collars n' cornstarch."

"Don't say that in front of them, Darrel."

"But it's true." Ruffled hair. "Lookit them choir boys."

Party Saturday night. Forgetting I have the car keys. Not even feeling them when I plop onto the couch. I can't sit there. I can't sit there; not there, either; well, where can I sit? Being dragged through room after room; laughing; _man, all these squares know how to play is bridge and Go-Fish_. Euchre; counting cards, flickering cards. Take a swig every time someone draws a card. Ha! I win.

Paul's face, worried and clownish in the lights and loud noise. "Hey, buddy, you okay?"

"Ummmm." A huge grin on my drunken mug. "Nope."

Pick up the telephone. Miss the receiver a few times. Fall off the couch. Think the piano is a couch.

Call Molly Anderson.

It's not Molly Anderson.

_I just wanted them to be proud of me… they've done so much… and then I do this… _

Heaving water into an empty toilet bowl. Panting. Burning. The dog sits on the tile and watches with big gleaming eyes. Go away. Go_ away_—

Monday morning, taking a math test with a pounding head and swollen eyes. The room swirls just like vomit. Smells like vomit, too. Always smells like vomit. Vomit made of tonic and gin.

Whispers, scratching notes. Shut up. Just shut up.

Picking up the pen, a thousand miles away.

What the hell.

Solve for x.

(x + 2) (3x – 4) – x = 1.

Screen doors groaning. Dying engines.

"The mail came in for you."

The mail didn't come in for me, it came for Dad.

"No, it says Junior, sport. It's for you."

A trembling heart, steady fingers.

I love you and I hate myself.

Silence.

"I'm sorry, pal."

I'm sorry too, Dad.

Where's Molly? Needing to talk. Needing to talk to Molly Anderson. Needing to sit in her car and blow smoke in her ear. 'Cause she'll listen—she listens to every word—

Rounding the corner of Cherry Street. Old soles hitting the sidewalk. Hearing through the cars and pedestrians a familiar laugh. Running faster. Catching bright yellow hair; catching a brighter white smile.

All over Paul.

"I don't want to talk about it—I said I don't want to talk about it—"

"I wish I could take it away." Dad sitting quietly next to a lump on the bed, his hands clasped over his lap. "Your mother saved you a big slice of German chocolate."

Say I ain't starving when I am. Liar liar pants on fire.

I can do math. At least I think I can.

"They're thinking of putting Ponyboy a grade ahead. Isn't that wonderful news?"

"Yeah, Mom." Cracking a smile. "I'm real proud."

His eyes, knowing I'm lying.

Does everybody know? The rich kids do. Paul. Molly. They know but they don't. They're too loud in their cars, blaring, bright and shining and gold-plated… Don't you look at me like that.

Mom gripping my hand, so quiet, so still. She knows. Her fingers are hard from God-knows-what, but warm.

"I don't want to see you hurting like this. And the pressure builds till it hurts even to breathe. I love you too much, Dare-Bear."

"Don't call me that." I can't hold it in; the wetness, cold, slides down my cheek. And she says nothing. She just smiles softly as she kisses my hand.

I love you and I hate myself.

Ice cream. A brighter sky. Fresher air. The jingle of bells at the DX. Soda looking like he's died and gone to heaven, running his hands across sleek engine-red and sky-blue bodies.

Molly Anderson and Paul Holden flouncing in, arm-in-arm, two links in a merry-friggin'-chain.

"Let's go. Let's go home." Pulling Soda away like pulling a mountain out of the ground.

"Tight transmission, Dar."

Uh-huh.

"Think I'm gonna be a mechanic."

Uh-huh.

"Think I'll work under somebody."

Uh-huh.

"Think Dad will say okay?"

Uh-huh.

Vanilla ice cream dripping on the sidewalk all the way home.

Pony. Soda. Me. Playing Russian roulette with our made-up feelings, with our false prides. I keep drawing blanks.

A knock on the door at three in the afternoon. Mom teaching me to say Please and Thank you; the officer stepping through the door clenching his hat in his hands, looking anywhere but me. Please, sir. Thank you, sir. He opens his mouth to say things I don't want to hear—ever—but all I can do is Please and Thank him 'cause that's what she taught me to do.

I can't see them. Not even dressed nice. Not even in their caskets.

I will die.

Roses. Red. Blood. Fire. If I move outside the ring of fire I will be burned to nothing.

And the priest says:

"For dust you are, and to dust you shall return."

Pony, Soda, Steve, Johnny, Two-Bit, Dallas. Life marches in directions I have to keep following.

"Degree? Hell, kid, we accept anyone with a pulse." Clasping hands. Relief. A paycheck, at least. Dean's grin, weary with things I don't understand yet.

At least I can still do math…

Tired. Growing tireder. Phone calls. Dirty dishes. Bills. The woman who knocks every Tuesday. I send the boys to school and pray to all religions they come home. I don't know why I'm so racked-up. But if I don't keep them in line they'll fall on the wrong side of the tracks. Their thoughts. Not mine.

Whispers in the doorway. "He's just like a drill sergeant."

Ponyboy...

"Lay off. He's doin' the best he can."

Soda.

"I know. It's just, he yells so much—it's like I can't do nothin' right."

Falling asleep in the doorway, wanting no one but Dad. Wondering what he's thinking right now.

Darkness.

Early in the morning.

"You don't even care about me."

I do.

"You don't."

I do too, you son-of-a-bitch. I do so much it hurts.

"Pony, I didn't mean to—" My hand as red as his face. All of the tiredness, gone, but too late—too late—the screen door swings wide open and I've lost him, just like I've lost everyone else.

_Red Rover, Red Rover, send somebody over_: the news blasting. A West-Side kid stabbed in the park; two suspects gone missing. Johnny's face. Pony's. Is this the last time?

_For dust you are. _The rich kid's name was Bob Sheldon. His parents and his pals wail it all over the station. Bob Sheldon, Soda says. Bob Sheldon. I don't even want to know his name was Bob Sheldon. I just want to be selfish with my own troubles for a little while.

_And to dust you shall return. _Ash blackening that face—so thin, so scared. His hair is the color of pissed-on snow. I want to grin but I can't keep from letting that sliver of me slip out again, that cold wet diamond; and I don't laugh. Not now. I hold onto him as though I'll never lose him again. 'Cause I won't.

Dallas, Johnny. Thinking of them as we gather up the troops. This one's for them, boys.

Cold soap and steaming water. The black T-shirt the boys gave me for Christmas. Realizing that, no matter how I comb back my hair, I don't look like myself.

Whooping and whirling like an idiot, just because I can.

I can do this.

I can do anything.

"I'll take anyone."

Paul Holden. Paul Holden standing in the street light because I've called him to it. Paul Holden the rich kid, Paul Holden the thief, Paul Holden my best friend, Paul Holden a lifetime ago.

"Hello, Darrel."

"Hello, Paul."

I can't hit him. They expect me to, his friends, mine. But I can't. So I turn round and round, forever snarling in the street, 'cause they think that's who I am and that's all I'm good for. I know that's what he thinks. And he can shove it right up his ass. 'Cause that ain't no Paul Holden circling me neither.

A shout. Dallas.

The world shatters.

No one's there to clean the blood. It seeps down the drain till it dries up.

Johnny and Dallas are dead. Oh, Lord, we're too late. Too numb. Too late.

Jesus _Christ—_

The leather chair I drag in from the back room as I watch Ponyboy sleep. He says things. And I can't keep running from them. Not anymore. I've got to grow up... mature... My hand on his head, warm and hard, just like Mom's. Staying there as morning turns to noon and noon turns to night.

I see three tiny spiders crawling down the wall. One right after the other.

We're gonna be okay.

Live and learn but don't forget. I used to believe in what if. Now all I believe in is what is.

Pulling my diploma out of the basin. Wiping off the dust as I crack it open. Darrel Shaynne Curtis, Jr. Class of 1962. Remembering Mom and Dad in the crowd. His smile. Her eyes. Snapping the book shut; thoughts of someday. Someday. I can still make them proud.

The courtroom, full of humidity. Collars n' cornstarch. Ain't that the damned gospel. The kids who live on the West side of town sitting on the right side, coughing, stiff; us East Siders sitting on the left, blank, smoldering, stiff.

North, East, South, West. "Never eat soggy wheat, 'cause a greaser just spit in your cereal."

A fan someone's dragged in sputters out dust every fifteen minutes. My heart beating in my chest, squeezing all the blood I have left out of my body. The testimonies piling up; the scribe working furiously to keep up with them. Then he goes to the witness stand. Please, God, let them go easy on 'im. He's just a kid.

He takes a breath. Looks around.

"He's a good guardian, Your Honor."

No. I'm not.

"He makes sure I do my homework every night and that I stay out of trouble. He works real hard, too—two jobs just to put food on the table. And he's stricter with me and Soda than our parents were."

Quit lying. Quit lying. Tell him I'm good at math. Tell him anything. Just not that.

"I guess what I'm saying, Your Honor, is that, when it came down to it... and I mean, really came down to it... I just... forgot." And as the judge asks for clarification he looks right at me, from across the sea of heads. And we both know.

My heartbeat fills the room.

"...the charges, considering the circumstances, no longer apply to manslaughter... acquitted... you have full custody, Mr. Curtis, granted by the powers of Tulsa County and the state of Oklahoma... this court is now adjourned."

Oh my God. That woman who knocks every Tuesday—now I can slam the door right in her fool face.

I win.

The wind through the trees. Someplace cooler, calmer.

Going home. Once I stop chasing happiness I can be content. Looking at our house for the first time—broken bikes, dry grass, loose tiles—and thinking it's the most damn beautiful thing I've ever seen.

* * *

When you were four I had a conversation with the cashier at the grocery store. An older lady, a friendly one. You insisted on dragging Pepper in so he could keep us company while Daddy looked at all the rice. Normally I'd have said no and pointed to the NO DOGS ALLOWED sign, but he's older than most of the staff and everybody knows him so well no one lifts a finger. He sits so calmly at the checkout. You like the way he leans into you, with his head pressed to your stomach. His tail swishing back and forth on the tile. You keep looking up at me and tugging my belt, as if to say, _Look, are you seeing this? Silly Pep!_

"Hard, ennit?"

"Huh?" I say, blinking, not watching her but the belt, to see if you didn't toss a fistful of candy on there. "Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sure."

Ever since you were born people have had this insatiable urge to tell me their life stories—and I think, Lordy, do I got to be everyone's Dad? I just want to get through the day with roof still tacked on.

A whimper. Pepper's sprung to his feet, scuttling away. You're slapping him on the belly. Repeatedly. And I mean you're beating on the poor old thing.

Seizing your collar, I tug you away.

"Don't."

"Huh?"

"Don't hit."

You stare at me.

"It's not nice," I explain. "Pepper's a good doggie, a nice doggie. We don't hit him. We pet him—like this. See?"

So I bend down and I take your little hand and show you how to stroke his fur, very softly, and I think the old coot is grateful for my intervention. He lifts his head and flashes his eyes at me. You giggle and keep your hand over his head. I rise again to pay the good store their dues and get the hell out of here.

"I see you love your daughter very much."

I nod.

"So," she says, "you think you'd ever have another?"

I'm starting to think if I hadn't fired off that "_Hell_ no" we might have still been friends, instead of me having to awkwardly navigate around her checkout every time I get eggs and bread.

But—you know.

* * *

This house is a war zone.

We argue whether the walls are _really_ white or _eggshell_ white. We argue about the politics of South America, the recession, the proper speed limit when confronted with a yellow light—I'm just saying, two hundred and fifty miles an hour might be a little overkill—the volume of the radio, the meaning of life, at what age is it appropriate to watch slasher flicks, if radishes are icky or not.

I say one of your favorite bands rips off so many others, it's a damn marvel no one's sent out a cease and desist yet, and you say I wouldn't know good music if it smashed in my front window, and I say It always does, with the way you blast the radio, and you say Turn up those hearing aids old man, 'cause it's gonna get even louder, and I say Louder? But the people in Taiwan can _hardly_ hear us!

"You should open up," say the well-intentioned, the ones who've never watched a kid for more than an hour at a time, the ones who smile, the ones who can dress themselves, the ones who have all their hair. "You should communicate more."

"Yelling's a mode of communication," I say. "So is _I'll smash your head in, do I look like I fell off the turnip truck, were you born in a barn, you get what you get and you don't throw a fit, if you don't stop crying I'll give you something to cry about, say that word again and in goes the soap, are your ears just decorations for your head, life ain't fair _and_ because I said so_."

"You're no fair," you say. "How come you always have to win?"

"Hun," I say, "when I'm wrong I'll admit it, but I never do because I never am."

And you sink back in your chair.

"He's seventeen," I say, "and you're thirteen."

"I don't care."

"So you're telling me he'd wait for you all during college?"

"I don't know." You blow out a sigh. "I can't tell."

"Maybe we should get that checked out."

"_Dad_!"

You're still not dating him.

You're still not dating him.

You're still not.

Nope.

Sorry.

Don't pout.

Don't.

Someday you'll thank me.

Just not today.

Or tomorrow.

Or the day after.

* * *

I'm not going to lie: I know what I said. I know you know what I said. I said it over the phone, late at night, when I thought a certain someone was tucked safely away in bed. But a certain someone was listening with the wall's ears, that someone stewed over it all night and got cranky from the lack of sleep, and that very same someone parroted it back to me the next morning: _You wanna flush 'em down the toilet when they're thirteen and plug 'em back up when they're thirty-five. _And yes. The defense admits to the charges. The defense reserves the right to plead the fifth. And the judge would also like to add that whoever said that was a goddamned genius.

* * *

Today I say: "Hey."

The clock, ticking. You studying the ice box in your bare feet, pajama bottoms and oversized Eagles T-shirt—because God forbid anyone but your father know you still like them—standing in the ring of cool air and light and sucking money right outta my wallet. I can hear it now. _Zhooom_. That's what Bran Flakes for a week sounds like.

I'm just about ready to say: _May I recommend breakfast? I hear it works better before lunch,_ when you suddenly turn around and say: "What?"

"What happened to that kid?"

"What kid?"

"That kid," I say.

"Huh."

What sparkling conversation Saturday morning brings. I set the paper down on the table, along with my glasses.

"Ryan," I clarify, "or Brian. Whoever."

You sure look confused for someone who's supposed to melt at the sound of her soul mate's name being spoken, because I heard it's _just like the beat of my own heart. _You trudge in with two bowls and three cereal boxes, plunk them down, and go back for the milk. You don't want to talk to any human being, let alone me. And as you close the fridge door with your foot you say: "Who?"

* * *

_four: jeremiah was a bullfrog_

* * *

King Arthur once had a nightmare.

It was a time of war, and as such important dreams came often to the monarch and his knights. Some people claimed they were messages from the divine, such as Galahad's vision of the Grail, while others, far colder and more analytical in their reasoning, called it the Jungian pool from which the local subconscious might've dipped. Whatever the reason had been, it didn't matter. Britain's kingdom was falling apart in thousands of different ways. There was Guinevere. The queen whose loyalties split the king down the middle. There was Lancelot. The knight whose scruples lost to passion. There was Mordred. The bastard son whose rage could not be tamed.

Arthur was there, an ancient man passing ninety, lost somewhere in the fringe between yesterday's hopes and tomorrow's bitterness. It was nearing the end—as all empires do, as all living thriving beings must do—approaching the fast-flowing seasons of darkness, of wither, of death. The days marched inevitably towards the time when Britain would descend into the mists, never again to be touched by the hand of myth.

In this dream he was sitting on top of the wheel of fortune. It was a huge grinding gear being churned by a girl—perhaps disguised as a cunningwoman—standing very down below. He watched as the spokes groaned and the massive thing ascended. Up and up the wheel went... up and up and up and up, as if one inch closer he could reach out and touch heaven with a mere mortal hand.

Then, when Arthur reached the pinnacle, the girl who had been cranking the wheel stopped and said: "No king has ever reached these heights before. Fortune has found that you see the peaks of greatness, but they carry with them great sorrow. If you should continue, unspeakable strife shall come upon you."

And to this Arthur said nothing.

The girl repeated her warning three times. And each time the old king refused to hear her, transfixed on the shining world ahead.

Finally the girl, having done her duty, resumed cranking the eternal wheel. And just before waking to another day of battle Arthur fell to the ground and broke every bone in his body.

* * *

"That's a bullshit story," says Soda, as he spits his gum out the window. At ten he thinks it's the neatest thing ever to swear when the parental units aren't looking. He yanks up the pane by its cracked paneling and peers through the drizzle. "It hit the trash can! All right!"

"It's not bullshit." But I know so much better. At my feet lies a book whose girth can kill a small army of men. I've got stuff to do, but... It's growing harder not to convince him to the otherwise. Course reading consists of a rustic manuscript of a frigging thousand years, the covers moth-eaten, the pages lucky enough if they didn't crumble to powder. The words inside are wryttn as if sumbuty nevr lurnt how to spel, which ain't too hard to imagine if you knew a prisoner pretty much scrawled it all down. There are thirty or so chapters of folks in armor and dresses not doing much. For an epic about a great man's death, there ain't much substance to it beyond: "Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention this obscure knight who got out of prison. Well, yeah, he got out of the prison in which he was put in for for killing the King's cousin, whose name I shall not give despite giving every piece of conceivable armor and quite possibly bowel movements names, and after some weird-ass adventures he killed his long-lost brother because_, tee hee_, turns out he was unlucky as shit."

"Difficult reading" don't begin to do justice to this monster. The Bible's trees and genealogies would cringe at this Daddy-went-around-a-lot shit.

And boy, Daddy went around a lot in them days, says Wise Man Soda. No cars or television meant lots of boredom and open-grove ladies.

I lift an eyebrow.

What are you—

Which means they musta squirted out babies like orange juice.

Soda—

Ripe for the pickin' and the squeezin'.

Stop that—

Orange juice babies, Dar. All sticky and slimy.

That's just _wrong_—

Yum.

OK, I think. _Who _was telling this story again...? Luckily Pony had spotted a ladybug and was too busy pushing it along with his finger to notice.

I look briefly at the floor. Mythology is easy, says Paul. You can sleep during that class, says Paul. Paul's a fucking crack addict, if that's his sleep schedule. It ain't a necessary class, even—I could have just taken a study hall instead, a thought that tortures me every day—but if I don't at least try to keep up it's gonna suck all the brains out of my head.

I put my head in my hands.

"It's mythology."

"It's bullshit," Soda says.

"It's homework."

"It's bullshit."

"It's a project."

"Bull-shee-it."

Pony says nothing, watching the pale shadow of lightning illuminate the curtains. He had sat transfixed during the entirety of the story, unlike Soda, who had fidgeted and tried to flick erasers across the room.

So I wonder, through the haze of his pounding skull, if he's simply looking past us or still wading out of the story. Then, just as the thunder gets loud, I squeeze my eyes shut and press my teeth together. If I had a migraine I'd very well scream. I weren't no old man and god _damn_ it I wasn't about to feel like one now.

"OK," I say, balling up his fist. "Say that one more time, you little snot-nosed—"

Bouncing on the bed, Soda lets loose a grin that stretched the limits of his face, raising two middle fingers in front of him and wriggling his bony hips in some erratic victory dance. "Mom and Dad ain't home and I can fuckin' cuss as much as I fuckin' want, and you can't do jack shit about it, carpet-muncher!"

* * *

That's Soda. The pottymouth. We go see him in late May, when it rains. So there we walk down the gray street, as important people in important suits run to the nearest roof, despite the fact that you're drier when you walk. Important people tend to fill hot air in their skulls and call it brains.

"How'd they choose them?"

"What?"

"The soldiers," you say. "I mean."

"They played Eenie-Meenie-Miney-Mo."

You tell me to be serious now, and I assure you I am being serious. There ain't no reason like missing reason. They looked at the men in the country and said, _My mother said to pick the very best one and you are it. _And that was that.

The Very Best One was a kid named Sodapop Curtis. He wasn't too well suited for what they had planned for him: he hated taking orders from people, especially ones who thought they knew better than him (AKA me). He hated routine and boredom and all that it entailed. He got knocked back a mile every time he fired a BB gun. And there was the question of choice. Soda dropped out of school, had little money, but he felt that that shouldn't mean jack. He still had a life to live, and come hell or high water, he was gonna live it. So when the finger got pointed, we couldn't believe it. He couldn't believe it. And the Board said Yes, this is the Very Best One.

For years Dad was scared I'd be the Very Best One. I had gotten scholarships, financial aid, TAP. We couldn't get enough to take me to college. They were sure, though, that by the time Soda got to age they'd have collected enough to push him through. Because my parents believed a sinking ship could still be saved. Dad gave me all the lectures, showed me all his artifacts, looked into my face as if looking into a shallow grave—and it got to the point where I was all but sure I'd be the Very Best One.

Just goes to show you you can't be too full of yourself.

* * *

Sodapop was skimpy on calls from the start, which drove me up and down the friggin' Great Wall of China. He was supposed to call from the station, from the helicopter, on the radio. But didn't. Handed me excuses instead. _Oh, I had drill. I was sleeping. Drill. Taking a leak. Drill. Drill. Drill again. Pushin' tanks across the country. Nothing to tell. If I tell you you won't have nothing to read in my letter. Writing letters. Papercut. Headache. Sleeping. Got our asses handed to us last night. Let me sleep. Almost shot m'self in the foot. Drill. Got slammed for smoking. Drill. Had to do extra crunches. Tired. Drill. Can't I eat dinner like everybody else? Really, Dar, god damn, some guys' moms don't give this much of a shit. _It was ludicrous but I found myself praying more that the phone lines worked than if something happened, because it was understood that a certain foot would go up a certain ass if the phone lines worked and a certain someone neglected to call.

He, of course, used my own insistence to torture me. One time he'd called piss-drunk and bawled: _Jeremiah was a bullfrog, he was a good friend of mine, I never understood a single word he said but I helped him a-drink his wine—_ and when he finished with the song he asked me if I was happy now and then laughed and while he laughed proceeded to call me a douchebag and hung up.

"We must really be losers," Pony said, without cracking a peek from his issue of _Popular Science_."Our own brother's crank calling us."

Still. A call is a call is a call.

Now that song; that song I remember, in his glass-shattering pitch; I just forgot the title. It's the song from that one movie with the guy who sits on the bench and talks about boxes of chocolate and goes overseas and meets the guy who talks nonstop about shrimp and then runs all over the country.

Forrest Gump?

I don't remember.

I remember Full Metal Jacket. The sergeant popping a blood vessel over the guy who smuggled in a jelly doughnut. I wonder sometimes if Soda did something like that, or if these movies are melting my brain and making me believe things like that—couldn't have been a complete Gulag if he could have read his comic books. Lord knows what I found under his bed (and I quote):

Flash Gordon comic. A poster of Ursula Andress. Bed springs, baseball cards, packs of stiff old chewing gum, a note from Two-Bit listing ten reasons why the study hall teacher could suck Hitler's dick (complete with illustrations), failing notices requiring signatures for geometry, biology, history and French (the likes of which I hadn't seen before, of course), a dark blue bandana, T-shirts bloodied and torn, a couple of coins, paperclips, marbles, wood shavings, a utility knife, electrical tape, wallet chains, matchbooks, an oil can, a Slinky, two halves of a broken yo-yo, a toothbrush, Mr. Goodbar wrappers, a baggie full of green plastic army men, a wash cloth made stiff with dried oil, an Animals record, my old leather gloves, a list of the ten most bangable girls in school with commentary courtesy Steve Randle, a faded gold watch fob—Dad's—a deflated basketball, a ticket to homecoming dance ripped in half, a picture of Mom and Dad smiling in front of the Lyric Theatre, a fishing lure, a Bible, four switchcombs, a pair of leather boots, torn paper bags, pliers, nail clippers, soda tabs, a shiny silver sphere that weighed and looked suspiciously like a pinball, scissors, a fly swatter, a left dress shoe, a Navajo-patterned blanket, a poncho, broken radio knobs, a spool of wire, a meticulously folded diner napkin with Mickey Rooney's signature on it (where in the world did he get that?), a small rainbow charm, the bottom half of a cue stick, an Elvis record, an empty carton of chocolate milk, a can of beef jerky, a book of stamps, a box of Band-Aids, a magazine about cars, a magazine about horses, a magazine about building your own robots, a speeding ticket with HEY FUCK YOU MAN scrawled across it in red magic marker, jumper cables, rubber coil, two baseball caps, undershirts, skeleton keys, a plastic car, three-inch nails, a Phillip's head screwdriver, an apple peeler, a flannel cap, a map of Florida that looked like it had been torn straight from an atlas, a carpet cutter, a Rolling Stones record, a defunct camera, Lincoln logs, a bell jar, light bulbs lacking their filaments, a black sock, five hundred dollars in Monopoly money, another speeding ticket, this time with a poem that said ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, I'M POORER THAN SHIT SO SCREW-FUCKIN'-YOU, shoelaces, a chipped bottle of cologne, a Beach Boys record, a dog leash, snapped rubber bands, a hammer, a pencil with the eraser chewed off, cracked aviator lenses, wire hangers, an exploded pen, an A of C pin that belonged to our mother, unopened packets of butter, a steel flashlight, a Bob Dylan record, a can of beige-colored paint, a four-leaf clover, threadless paint brushes, three sheets of popped bubble wrap, a crumpled-up poster of Superman with THINK HE COULD SHOOT UP LOIS FASTER THAN A SPEEDING BULLET, HA HA HA lovingly written over it by Steve, a vacuum cleaner bag, empty cans of hair oil, a rubber ball, rusted nuts and washers, a black silk tie knotted up in bunches, bug spray, milk caps bent and twisted, a bottle rocket, a wheat penny flattened by the railroad tracks, two belts missing their buckles, a bicycle handle, a picture of us standing on the dock at Lake Yahola, typewriter paper, spindles, a Parcheesi box, a wedge, sandpaper, a third speeding ticket that read DEAR OFFICER HEINSMAN, ARE YOU STILL LEGALLY BLIND OR JUST JACKING OFF IN THERE, LOVE, EVERYONE IN THIS TOWN, thumbtacks, deodorant, a note that read _You comin' or what?_, a sleeping roll, a bolo tie, a spoon, a couple of empty Pepsi bottles, a package of Luckys, an empty wallet clip, a condom still intact but with the plastic packaging ripped open—_don't wanna know, don't wanna know_—and a box of tattered letters to and from a pen pal in Jackson, Tennessee.

I was scared shitless of opening the closet. But at the same time I was being bad and snooping around for something—my old gloves? my pliers? my flashlight? who knows?—and when I found the letters, well, you can't quite pass something like that and not want to peek. So I peeked. A little. And I saw, in Soda's chicken-scrawl:

_Hey Georgie. How's it goin'? _

My eyebrows may or may not have hit the ceiling. Georgie Herman. He wrote Georgie Herman. The kid who once smashed his face into the toilet and said "Eat shit, greaser!" I didn't read the entire letter through—I just leafed through the pile, counting them. Forty. He sent forty letters to Georgie Herman. I couldn't quite solve this equation on my own so I picked up the letter stapled to it.

_Hey Sodapop. Got your letter just fine. Not much going on here. How's Darry and the kid brother?_

"You spyin'?"

I almost jumped out of my bones.

"No," I said, sitting thigh-deep in junk. "The tornado just touched down."

"No kidding." Pushing the door ajar, Ponyboy sidestepped the debris and walked gingerly towards the mattress. "Look at this. No wonder he slept in my bed. He was lyin' on top of the county dump."

"I'm scared to open the closet," I said. "Hold me."

"We might have to get a second mortgage on the house just to haul all this junk out."

"Shit. I might have to sell _you._"

"But I don't make a good hooker," Pony said.

"About time you got some kind of job or another."

"Ain't me who stuffed all of this into Narnia," Pony protested, picking up a remnant of the wreckage. "What did he do to my yo-yo? It's not supposed to do_ that_!"

* * *

For a while, this thing kept happening. I kept hearing my name. Each night that passed without him calling—over and over—I heard my own name, being called out and fading, as if someone were standing right next to me and whispering it in my ear.

_Darry._

July had come and gone faster than a blink. The rest of August passed without another phone call. September came. I thought: OK, he's on active duty. He ain't got time. I waited. October came, Ponyboy went off to school. The leaves on the maples turned brown and the air got misty and cold. I didn't say anything to anyone—how could I?—but with each passing day I felt something hard and hot churn inside my stomach.

One morning I rolled out of bed and padded towards the cool dark bathroom, thinking empty thoughts as I did. After all, I had to get up and put on my clothes and keep on like a normal human being.

Still, as I poured the coffee in the brew, as I strapped the harness to my belt, I heard that voice call my name, clearer than any of the others talking to me.

_Darry._

The next Friday a man knocked on the door. It was a brisk pounding, and even though I left a pot of water to brew on the back burner I considered running upstairs and ducking under the bed. That hot thing in my stomach had hardened and was sinking through my guts like a rock.

I went to the door in a haze. Each step leaden. The frame creaked open. I remember standing in the doorway in my bare feet, feeling the cold seep into my bones. There were two aviators, black, knocking my own reflection back at me. Small. I was so small. Lost in the black.

He took them off and I remember staring into the blue of the lieutenant's eyes, as he looked into me and through me at the same time. They were a strange kind of blue, a grayish steely blue, but the striking thing was that they were vivid, almost brilliant in color, which is rare in those types of eyes. His eyes glinted and flashed as much as the pins on his chest, and they were locked like lasers onto me.

Soda went missing in late September, he said, and was declared dead in October, when they took his body back from the hillside.

I don't think it could have hurt any worse if my heart had been ripped in two and each half impaled on my ribs. Because that was exactly what it felt like. The initial news is like a blow to the face; you don't know it at first, for a minute, before it sets in, because you blink and you say No. No that can't be right. That ain't right.

He said: "I'm sorry, son."

When the time came to call Pony at college, my hands shook and I dropped the phone.

_I'm sorry, son._

For a long time there was a weight, a huge crushing weight, and something dominated me like a darkness, a thick black haze, that followed me and stayed in my head and when it conquered my head moved on to my spirit. It was as if it was physically there in my head, a psychic tumor there, poking at my soft little brains. The photo I had in my pocket burned inside my eyelids, and because it was there I couldn't cry; Sodapop was there, and if I cried I might have washed him away, and make him disappear again. And to me, at that time, disappearance was worse than death. With death you know for sure where the other person is. Disappearance, they could be at any corner just beyond your eyes' reach and you wouldn't even know it. They gave me his things but I took them as if I were emptied from my skin: I put the box of shells and dog tags and artillery on the shelf and put the helmet on top of the piano and draped a light blanket over it. That was over. That part of Soda's life, the most difficult one, was over, I kept telling myself. One way or another it was over, and I wasn't sure yet if I wanted to know that part. So I went up the stairs and reached for the doorknob and went into his room. I can still hear the crack of the turn echo in the silence. The way it made it sound as if the whole of our lives was in the cold, cracking, crumbling. I hated the sound the minute I heard it—I ripped the door open and slammed it behind me and I just sat on the floor, for a long, long time, staring at an unstaring room.

I found one of his comic books. Not sure who it was about but I picked it up and I started leafing through the pages. I wasn't too keen on comic books but I wanted something, something, just a piece of what it must have been like, to walk in the same skin, to breathe the same air, to think the same thoughts. I couldn't do it but I kept trying: I kept trying to be Sodapop, if just for a minute, so that it wouldn't hurt so much that he wasn't there. Because although it was over, he wasn't gone. He was still here. Still here, as here as the sun on a clear summer day. More here than one bullet could have ever striven to be. Here, in this room, where the life in him swelled. He was bigger than life. Bigger than death. I tried to read. And soon the pages blurred and ran together, swirling into pinwheels of color.

I whipped the book against the wall, where it splayed out and fluttered to the floor in a pile of pages, and I buried my head between my knees.

For years I tried to pray but always found it a little unsettling, as if the stories were true and God was peering down listening to every word, ready to mark you off for the errors. But as I've walked through this life and seen what I did I've come to the conclusion that eternity isn't petty. What does thirty, forty, fifty years mean, in the bigger scheme of things? What does a tiny planet full of tiny people amount to? And I think it's this thought that's made me free, made me sad but free. And the truth is, I'd much rather be sad but honest than happy and a liar—because no matter how much you might think so, you ain't happy if you're not honest.

In that moment, I decided to be honest. No matter how much it hurt I'd be honest about it.

I rubbed the corners of my eyes—they were raw—and slowly, I closed the door behind me and went down the stairs, one at a time.

* * *

You can still see your uncle's helmet if you want. It's drier and cleaner than when it came to me, but it hasn't changed too much. His looked like anybody else's at the time: a mixture of adolescence and necessity. On the left side was a pack of M-40 shells, five tubes gleaming like a row of gold teeth. In case he needed to buy something he had glued a Vietnamese coin under the bill; cigarette wrappers padded the skull cushioning, God knows why. A keychain was clipped to the buckle at the end of the fastening strap; a woman's nude pink back, legs and ass. I'm thinkin' you might not like that part so much but there's Soda for you.

I passed it between my hands. The metal was dented on the bottom, battered all around, the olive tinged like rust. The ridges cracked the strokes, but atop the apex, in black paint, was a phrase in—Chinese? Vietnamese?—I didn't understand. I took it to the lieutenant down at the recruiting station, the one who delivered it home, actually. After scrutinizing the thing, he said it was essentially a sign that pointed in and said, SOUL.

He tapped his left temple. "The Buddhists think the head is the most sacred part of the body. When you're born that's where the stuff of you stays, and when you go that's where it escapes."

So I took it home in silence, set it on top of the piano, and stared at it for hours.

Inside the helmet, just above the scalp, was this thing called a compress bandage. Soldiers use them to put pressure on a wound, and strapped to the head is nearly the only way you can keep something that important without it getting blown off. The bandage was yellowed instead of white, and it had been held in with black straps just above the skull cushioning.

A spot of neon red caught my eye, just because most of the other colors were faded or worn. I peeled back the compress bandage and this flimsy wet paper flopped out. I lifted off the floor the way you would a brittle leaf.

The cover of Flash Gordon.

There was a blank advertising box on the back of the cover, and within this six-by-six inch box, in words almost too small to see, Sodapop had written this letter.

* * *

_If you're reading this, it means that you're really clever. You found my soul, you bastard. It might also mean that you found it by accident, or that something went down and you took it from me, either from my body or myself, or maybe it got knocked off and you just found it lyin' there in the dirt. In any case—I only hope this reaches the right hands. 'Cause the folks the right hands belong to know exactly what this means. And if you're one of them, you know. And I'm sorry. _

_I tried. Really I did. You know all that stuff they tell you about freedom, about liberty? I don't know where that went. All I know is that when I'm out here, I'm scared. They tell me SOP's to get in and get out, and I'm just scared. I'm scared the way I used to be of big dogs and thunder... only now I know... I know what real fear is like._

_If you're reading this, it means I'm lost, and I'm trying to find my way back home. Sooner or later I know I'm gonna find it. I just hope it's not sooner than later._

_If you're reading this, it means don't cry for me. I've had enough tears to last me another life. Now I'm just tired. Real tired. I just can't get it in me to cry. Never could take much cryin'. I mean, it comes out, but... but no one's ever brought back someone just by cryin' for 'em. I guess it's a way to remember, but these days all I wanna do is forget._

_If you're reading this, it means I loved you. Whoever you are. I loved you and I just couldn't say it 'cause I was too stupid and selfish to even understand what it meant. It means I lived my life and you should do the same. It means to smile every now and then. It means to laugh. It means to hug the shit out of your best friend. Right now. _

_Take a look up at the sky. You see what I see? That same moon, those same stars? It means to look at them and be glad you're alive, and be glad that the people in your life have been alive, and to tell them just what you really feel. It means to look around. It means to talk and to listen. It means not to be afraid of the answer—'cause life's just too short._

_I ain't no different than you. I was a kid who loved comic books and goofing off with my friends. I lit the weed every now and then and I got smacked up in fights. I loved a girl and I lost a girl. I had a best friend who I laughed and cried with; I pray all the time that I can see his face, punch him in the arm, tell him to buck up, it's not so bad._

_I was a kid. I had a weird name and I ate candy and I cracked dirty jokes and I wondered if God was really out there._

_Well...guess I'll be finding out real soon._

_P.S. Hey, Darry..._

_Jeremiah was a bullfrog._

* * *

_five: burning_

* * *

I'd be lying if I said I never did bad things. Hell, the skies would open up and God would strike me down before I could even open my mouth.

A lot of the world's woes come from waiting. A lot of waiting for something to change, for a little wiggle in a silent line. Looking at each other, seeing your friends as what you thought they could've been instead of who they were. But that's the way you see the world when you're young and got so much to do and yet not enough. You're filled with yourself. You're so full of yourself you can't quite see beyond the road. And it's OK. It's not to go into old Dad rant again, how the world is fucked up because of the young. Because it's not. It's just what it is. When you're young you wait. You wait. And if you wait long enough you get old.

Like me.

I'm not going to lie: at times you make me scared. And that's different from being scared, you see, because when you're scared you can tell yourself you're causing it and a little part of the fear fades away. But that's the worst thing, having fear creep in on you and jump in and stay there, sticking to every corner of your skin like oil, crawling up and down and moving around inside you like a living thing. I experienced it three times in my life: one the day I answered the door, and the cop on the other side wrung his hat in his hands and looked right through me and said _I'm sorry, son_; two the night Ponyboy went flying out the door, off into the cold night; and three at the whistle of the train, the train going to San Diego, standing with all the other umbrellas at the platform and wincing at the shrill of my mistake.

You threaten a fourth.

I have a migraine. Not a headache but a migraine, two wood planes clapped to the sides of my skull and screwed in so tight a piece of paper couldn't slip through.

"You've been hiding," I say quietly. "Why?"

"I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry, too."

"It's just words," you say. "This is just—"

"Don't be melodramatic," I say.

Silence.

"Don't—don't tell me to go."

"Why?" I ask bleakly. "Your feet are here, the door's right there."

"You okay?"

"Shit." I groan. "Never was."

Your dark eyes gleam, and you say nothing.

"What's wrong?"

"I'm stupid—I'm so _stupid_—"

"You're not stupid."

And there your head goes, in the cusp in between my neck and shoulder.

I work hours. I get money. It ain't enough. Our grass ain't green enough, it ain't sparkling emerald, and shoot, I could have told you that twenty damn years ago. I give and I give and I give; I give till I get tired. And I wonder, not much, just a little thought surfacing, like a bubble to the pond: Just how can you be so selfish, so contained, so encased in your own little glass bubble that you can't see anything of me at all? But as I ask the question I already know the answer. It's because the glass is so fogged and smoked you can't see Daddy bleed, you can't feel the fear in his face, you can't see the single drop that rolls down his face as you disappear into the darkness. You can't see him or answer him or hear him, and if you touch him it's with the coolness of distance. No; it's all brightness in there, brightness and distance and smoke, because Daddy is a rock, Daddies are forever, nothing bad can ever happen to the single pivot in your life—otherwise you'd fall off your axis and go flying off at the speed of light into a great big nothing. And I know when I was your age I never wanted to think of that, losing my old man, my pivot—it was unthinkable, like thinking about death or God—but I turned around and there it was, like a bitter old friend, staring at me from the glass of two aviator lenses.

I turn over in the covers, watching the stars pulse in the dim. I can seethe or I can live and let live. You're selfish because you need to be. Someday you'll shed it, the way a kid sheds his baby fat. But for now, as long as I don't let it infect the inside, I can let you wear your armor, your bright and fragile glass bubble, for as long as you need to. Because that's what Dad does. He keeps that bright thing burning even in the great big nothing.


End file.
